The Aught-omatic

An interactive guide to all the "best movies of the decade" lists.

Which movie is the best of the decade? The Onion's A.V. Club has anointed Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Time Out New York liked Spotless Mind, too, ranking it third, but gave its No. 1 spot to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. The New Yorker's Richard Brody didn't put either of these movies on his heady list. He gives the brass ring to Jean-Luc Godard's Eloge de l'amour (In Praise of Love). Long live the Nouvelle Vague!

So the question remains: Which movie is the best of the decade? Is there any consensus among the accumulating lists? To find out, we collected all of the rankings we could find and synthesized the results using a simple scoring system: Movies got 50 points for being the No. 1 pick on a list, 49 points for a No. 2 nod, and so on, down to one point for a No. 50 slot. (Brody, who only chose 26 movies, still received 50 points for his top pick.)

To see which movies of the aughts are earning the most end-of-decade love, select the "Points" category from the drop-down menu on the left. You can also sort the films by director or by total number of appearances on best-of lists. (Some directors had more than one movie in the running; mouse over the director's name to see which of his or her movies made the cut.)

[Update, Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2009, 7:58 p.m.: We've added indieWIRE's Critic's Survey. Because Richard Brody took part in the indieWIRE survey, we have removed his list from the Aught-omatic so as not to count his picks twice. For a full list of the critics who participated in the indieWIRE survey, click here.]